How to hire and onboard Technologists – the book

The tech world moves fast. New technology. New consumer markets. New coding languages. New delivery methodologies.

And for some companies, new ways of hiring and on boarding technology professionals. Sadly though, there are still many companies struggling to find, attract, hire and onboard new hires with grace, dignity and efficiency. So I wrote a book about how to hire and onboard technologists.

A friend of mine recently joined a new company and knew he shouldn’t have. The hiring process was awful, the contract was wrong, the first day was a disaster. He said to me “WTF have I done?”.

It reminded me of a time I joined a new company and quit after just 8 days. It reminded me of a time I joined a company and didn’t have a laptop for 4 days – despite it being a laptop based job. It reminded me of a time I went for an interview and was told there were no “right or wrong answers” but I didn’t get the job. Or the time it took 5 weeks for someone to respond to whether or not I got the job. Or the time I got asked “Do you have any physical difficulties” (You can’t ask that question).

You get the point. Not every company is on top form when it comes to hiring technology professionals.

The reality is that good professionals are in demand – so why do so few companies put in the effort to snaffle that talent quickly and with dignity?

(International links to the book on Amazon are at the bottom of the post)

When we were growing our team 100% year-on-year we struggled in our first 6 months to attract and hire the right people. Then we put the candidate at the heart of the process and we made sure everything we optimised was for the candidate experience.

We made sure we took the nerves away from starting a new company and we made sure our new starters were well looked after and informed within their first few weeks at work. It wasn’t always perfect and we made a ton of mistakes, but we never stopped making the process better.

I’ve included some ideas on how you too could do that, if you feel your hiring and on boarding strategies aren’t working.

The book started out as a blog post but it soon became a field manual on how to hire and onboard new starters. Of course, this book is just what I think should happen – every company is different, but when we implemented what I included in this book we had the following effect:

Our recruitment costs were insanely low, as many hires came from word of mouth, our own personal branding efforts or our own marketing activities.

Our churn rate was around 3% – pretty good. People didn’t leave.

Candidates who didn’t make it through the interview process told others about how amazing the process was, and how brilliant the company was!

Our average elapsed time from first speaking to the candidate to a decision, was around 10 days. Pretty good also.

Here’s what’s in the book:

The other way will also work

Assumptions

The structure of this book

You have a choice

The Hiring Plan – what problems or opportunities exist?

Effective Employees

Sourcing – attracting talent

Balance Benefits

Effective Job Adverts

Use Agencies

Hire Alone

Hiring – flowing people through your process

Staple yourself to a candidate

Design a WOW service

How to conduct a good phone interview

Face to Face Interviewing

Onboarding

WTF

MEH

WOW

A sample Onboarding process

Some Considerations

The Flow

Bringing it all together

The book is roughly 23,800 words and is super easy to read. I tried to avoid too much jargon and kept it super simple.

If you’re trying to hire and onboard technology professionals I hope this book is super valuable for you. What’s included inside helped us hire and grow a brilliant agile DevOps team – I hope it helps you achieve your goals too.